


Sacred Hour

by caelenath



Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers S.P.D.
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Pre-Canon, Psychic Abilities, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:34:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24938386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caelenath/pseuds/caelenath
Summary: Life can be strange when you have a psychic for a roommate, but Sky is adapting better than he expected.
Relationships: Bridge Carson & Sky Tate
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Sacred Hour

They had a sacred hour in their room. Bridge didn't always use it for the same thing, nor was it always the same hour, and it wasn't always an hour, but none of that was the point. All Bridge needed was a guarantee of some regular interval of time where he could effectively turn off for a while in order to recharge, to center, to ground—a lot of different words had been used, but what it came down to was this: In that sacred hour, have as little around him as possible that he needed to ignore because the extent to which he could ignore anything was very little. For someone whose powers couldn't be turned off or even turned down, "turning off" meant finding a way to turn everything else off.

Which was, of course, impossible. But a safe space during a quiet time in the Academy was good enough, and the dorm room they shared was the safest space available, "safe" in this case meaning everything in it was so familiar that Bridge didn't "see" any of it anymore, and that included Sky.

Sometimes Bridge asked if he could have the room to himself, to which Sky never said no, but other times, it was fine if Sky stayed so long as he spent the time doing something quiet and not SPD-related. According to Bridge, work-related tasks produced too much mental stimulation that he could "hear", which Sky certainly hoped was the case since he put a lot of effort and care into his work, but he also wasn't convinced it wasn't actually a problem. He suspected his roommate was just trying to keep him from working too much.

On the other hand, what Bridge wanted or needed was precisely the point of sacred hour. After a bit of trial and error, Sky settled on two things he could do that didn't disturb his roommate: sleep, or read silently from his small hidden cache of sci-fi novels—yellowed, dog-eared paperbacks full of useless brain junk that he already knew by heart. Apparently the "sound" of him reading was monotonous in a helpful way, like the lapping of waves at a lake's shore or the hum of a refrigerator in the middle of the night.

Analogies like that became less weird the longer he knew Bridge, and it even reached a point where he asked, out of genuine curiosity, what the sound of him sleeping was like.

"It sounds like breathing," Bridge said, looking puzzled as though Sky had asked something strange. Sky decided to let it go, but sometime later, Bridge had a different answer.

"It sounds like peace," he said without Sky even asking anything. "You know when you're indoors and warm and dry, and there's rain outside that you know is there but can't actually hear? It sounds like that."

It shouldn't have made any sense, that description of a sound you couldn't actually hear, and yet, Sky knew exactly what he meant.

"Did you know you shield in your sleep?" Bridge went on. Unlike the analogies, the topical whiplash was one thing that didn't lessen with time.

"What?"

"It doesn't happen all the time. I'd say not even a half, or a third, of the time. But when it does happen, there's this shield"—Bridge moved his hand in a flattened arc—"around you while you're sleeping, and it seems to keep your energy in. I don't hear you when you're shielded, which is different from your forcefields when you're awake. I wonder if it keeps energy out too, like bad vibes or juju that could give you nightmares. That'd be pretty cool."

Sky had no idea what he was talking about. All he knew was that the last time he'd accidentally made a forcefield in his sleep was when he was three years old.

"But," Bridge went on, because that was what he did given the chance, "it actually kind of freaks me out when the sound of you disappears and it's totally quiet because it's like _you_ disappear."

Sky frowned, wondering how it was possible for something that hadn't actually happened to unsettle him as if it had. "But I didn't."

"Not actually, no. But if you think about it, to me, you kind of do."

It wouldn't occur to Sky until later that these sacred hours tended to reveal more about him than about Bridge even though Bridge did most of the talking afterward. He tried observing his roommate in turn, unobtrusively he thought, but it turned out he couldn't do it without Bridge knowing. It didn't take psychic powers after all to feel someone's eyes on you, so if Bridge objected, which he didn't always, Sky had to stop.

Meditation was a common use of the sacred hour, and occasionally Bridge did it upside down, which was as odd as it was impressive.

"How is that comfortable?" Sky ventured one evening after Bridge was done. Lying in bed with a novel propped on his chest, he'd been watching his roommate stand on his hands for at least five minutes.

"It's not _un_ comfortable," Bridge said. "And comfort isn't really the point." He then coaxed Sky into trying it with him. Though Sky was more than strong enough to support his body weight upside down, he had trouble staying that way.

"It's not the inversion, it's the stillness," Bridge concluded. "You don't like being still."

If it had been anyone else who said it, Sky probably would have gotten combative. He was competitive by nature and he wasn't ashamed of it. But something about the sacred hour made everything feel weirdly slow, as if time had been stretched out like a piece of gum, but not evenly. The instinct to object to Bridge's words didn't kick in until a long time after he spoke them, yet by the time it kicked in, Sky didn't want to object anymore because he knew Bridge was right.

At the same time, it was also true that Sky was never more still, physically and mentally, than he was during sacred hour. Had that been the point all along too?

"You make it easier," Sky said, and in a rare reversal, it was Bridge this time who had to ask what he meant.

"You make it easier to be still. Or, to slow down, at least. I don't know if it's you or what you do or something else entirely, but this time always feels different somehow. Slower. Deeper. Have you ever wondered if maybe you can affect things around you instead of only the other way around?"

Bridge took a long time to consider that. "If I do, or if I can, affect things around me, I wouldn't know it unless someone told me, or unless someone realizes it themselves and I pick it up from them. You know." He waved a hand by his head noncommittally. "Or if it turns out I don't really affect anything at all."

He looked at Sky. "Do I? Do you think I affect things?"

"Yeah," Sky said. "You do."

**Author's Note:**

> The bit about Sky's hidden stash of novels is not an original idea of mine. Rather, it's inspired by the mysterious consensus of multiple people back in my LiveJournal days that science fiction is what Sky is really reading behind his SPD manual.


End file.
